The new? Trimble Sketchup SDK

th3lurker

Hi!
Been gone for a while, and i am not really up-to-date on the news. So this is more of a please help me understand the situation, rather then a technical question. I developed an exporter some while ago, which had (and still has) problems. Most of them related to having to use ruby as the export tool(writing to a temporary file and then reading and interpreting it in ruby and creating the .skp, using a Sketchup itself).
While a C++ SDK existed while Google owned Sketchup, they were clear that they would not support the kit, and thus we chose Ruby.
But now, checking around again it seems Trimble has deprecated the old SDK and created a new one? I mean http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/su-api/index.html.
Is it reliable? Is it usable? What can you guys tell me about this SDK?
Thanks

bugra

Hi th3lurker,

Yes, this is a brand new SDK that exposes a C interface. We think it exposes cleaner API and it is easier to use. We are fully committed to supporting it for the foreseeable future. It is not yet as fully featured as the old SDK was, especially for creating skp files, but we are slowly building up the needed features and we need more feedback. So please check it out if you can.

Thanks!
Bugra Barin
SketchUp Team

Gábor

Great news. Where is it downloadable from?

bugra

Here it is:
http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/sdk_start.html

Gábor

Thank you for the download link. I'll try it out for sure.

th3lurker

That's great news Bugra, but could you be a little more detail what you meant with "It is not yet as fully featured as the old SDK was, especially for creating skp files"?
Cause i would like to use it, but only when i am certain i can implement everything i need to implement.
Basically i need to create a few (thousand) volumes, split then in named groups and subgroups, set them on named layers, place and position non-standard external textures(.png) on most of the faces, smoothen some edges. Probably set some edges to invisible, because of triangulation and all. Lock a group, name the skp. There's probably a lot more, but i need to revisit my code to sure. We are on very different time zones so i am writing from home, hoping i find an answer in the morning.
Cheers

bugra

I think we can do most of those but not all. Take a look at the SUGeometryInput family of functions. It lets you create big meshes of geometries at once and add them to an "Entities" using SUEntitiesFill. We don't have great support for modifying the geometry once you create it though. So creating geometry and splitting them into groups would not work yet. You'll have to create them in the group to begin with. So it requires a bit more careful programming as it stands today. We also don't have support to lock groups. I'll add that to our list.

Thanks!
Bugra

th3lurker

Sorry if i seem lazy, i could probably figure all of this myself if i spent enough time looking at the documentation, but i figured one of the developers can give me more insightful info.
So i've made a list of things i need to do, if it's not too much to ask can you tell me if these functions are implemented? Is everything i see in the http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/su-api/globals_func_0x73.html#index_s list operational?
I'll try to keep it in a "chronological" order
Edit: 0. One click export. Click a button in our UI and:

Open a specific .skp file (we use templates)
Create new named layers and set entities' layers
Create a tree structure of named groups, some containing named entities
3b.Iterate through the tree structure to find a certain group(stupid question, but still).
Create new faces and add custom textures on them, position and stretch texture material, set opacity
4b. I used to create new faces using a mesh(because of speed issues), but this poses several problems. The face does not "exist" until i use fill faces from mesh, so i have to store the texture information separately. Fill from mesh erases all entities that existed previously in the group, so i have to wait until i am sure i have no more faces to add to the mesh. Could i use SUFaceCreate instead? Like i said, speed is an issue here, some of out projects have thousands of entities, and 10+ faces/ entity is not uncommon.
Set edge smoothness
Locking the group is not that important
Save the file
Are the .skp's backwards compatible?(sketchup8, maybe even 7, i have no real idea what the clients use).
Sorry for disturbing you again.

bugra

Hi, sorry about the delayed response. One important thing about the current SDK is that it cannot work with the in-memory model that's live in SketchUp, it can only open existing skp files. So you'll have get the file saved first.

Here are some answers to your questions. For the ones I skipped, it means we should be able to do it.

@th3lurker said:

4b. I used to create new faces using a mesh(because of speed issues), but this poses several problems. The face does not "exist" until i use fill faces from mesh, so i have to store the texture information separately. Fill from mesh erases all entities that existed previously in the group, so i have to wait until i am sure i have no more faces to add to the mesh. Could i use SUFaceCreate instead? Like i said, speed is an issue here, some of out projects have thousands of entities, and 10+ faces/ entity is not uncommon.

Yes, you can use SUFaceCreate but using meshes (i.e. SUGeometryInput*) is currently the only way to map textures due to various reasons. We are looking into adding that to individual faces as well.

@th3lurker said:

Locking the group is not that important

We do not support locking groups yet. I'll make a note.

@th3lurker said:

Are the .skp's backwards compatible?(sketchup8, maybe even 7, i have no real idea what
the clients use).

We currently save only in the 2013 format. It's on our list to be able to save in older formats.

Thanks!